Acid Redux

Dear Editors,

I enjoyed reading Deeva Gupta’s letter, “The Organic Intellectual Situation” in Issue 48, written in response to my Issue 47 piece, “Acid Rhythms.” The letter opened up big questions through a small, often misemployed phrase — the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s term “organic intellectuals” — that I used in my piece on Detroit’s music and organizing cultures. As Gupta points out, the term organic intellectual is often misconstrued as an identitarian category, partly because the English translation suggests a sort of natural rootedness. You’re an organic bourgeois intellectual, say, if you check all three boxes of being an intellectual, being bourgeois, and being someone who dedicates their intellectual work to the non-class-traitorous project of the bourgeoisie. And you’re a working-class organic intellectual if . . . well, Gupta argues, that might actually be “structurally impossible.” That’s because the true meaning of Gramsci’s phrase isn’t about nature, or rootedness, or identity, but about representation. Organic intellectuals give “a social group ‘homogeneity and an awareness of its function.’” They represent it and work on its behalf. In Gupta’s reading, Gramsci contends that perhaps “only capitalists can produce their own intellectual class.” The popular classes remain too “large and fractured” for any representative voice to speak in their name.

I should admit that Gupta knows Gramsci better than I do. I’ve only read the old red-and-black-cover Selections from the Prison Notebooks, rather than the whole three volumes. And I should also admit that when I wrote the phrase organic intellectuals in “Acid Rhythms,” I was, as Gupta suspects, using an inherited shorthand. But my shorthand was actually much closer to Gupta’s meaning than the common incorrect usage. I remember having my mind blown sometime around 2015 when I went to the office of Timothy Brennan, a cultural studies professor at the University of Minnesota (and the author of a very good new biography of Edward Said). There, I learned that the “organic” in “organic intellectual” actually, in the original Italian, meant something like “organizing” or “organizational.” You were an organic intellectual if you were an intellectual who organized. That was news to me. And that was the shorthand I had in mind when I wrote, of C. L. R. James (son of a petty-bourgeois colonial-era teacher), James Boggs (son of working-class domestic servants), and Grace Lee Boggs (daughter of a bourgeois restaurateur), that they were “three of the US left’s most original organic intellectuals.”